We EGGcept her...one of us

When I was in middle school, I had a friend named Megan. She was like me: loud, funny, and smart. A lethal combination for parents and teachers alike. The only difference between us was that I was nice and she was mean. What I mean is, whereas Megan would stick her half sisters wet Barbie dolls in the freezer to make them shatter, I would secretly give her sister cheapo Barbie’s because I thought Megan went over the line. And the only reason they were cheap was because I was 14 and had to save up my lunch money to get them. Maybe it was guilt ‘cause I laughed at the shattering, but I thought doing that to a 5 year old was cruel. And yes it gets into her hatred for her step-mom and misplaced anger at the little girl. But that’s not what this is about. This is about the scar on my toe.
Megan’s dad’s kitchen had a linoleum floor. We never thought much of it. In fact, we never even cared about it until Megan dropped an egg. For reasons I can no longer wrap my brain around, Megan, rather than cleaning it up, stepped on the uncooked yolk and white matter. Megan commented on how slippery it was. Megan convinced me to do the same. I vaguely remember how slimy and cold it was. I really remember how slippery it was. Megan and I tried to spread the egg over more of the kitchen floor. We found a new game. When the egg could not satisfy how much we needed to cover the entire kitchen floor, Megan broke another egg. And then another. And then…well, Megan and I emptied out a whole carton. The floor of her kitchen was now essentially an egg skating rink. The smell was making us dry heave, but the fact that we were sliding all over was totally worth it. We started attempting triple sow cows, and double turns and spinning and all these stupid ice skating tricks that neither of us could do. I remember laughing so hard, mixed with this vomit inducing smell that I didn’t know if I should be more worried about horking or peeing. I laughed so hard at one point that I had doubled over. This now changed my center of balance. So I stood up quickly. That again made me unbalanced. At this point, I am now moving my torso up and down as if I’m pushing one of those old school railway cars. When my torso couldn’t handle it anymore, one leg went out. I tried to tell it to come back, and when it did the other jutted out just as fast. I ended up looking like a Russian dancer, with one leg quickly replacing the other. I’m sure if you got a video of it in slow mo, at one point both of my legs would’ve been off the ground. Like that old video about racehorses. And whether or not all their legs were off the ground at the same time. I was able to do this for about 60 seconds. And I honestly thought I would have been able to finally regain my balance. But mixing the laughing, with the dry heaving, with my newly found Russian heritage, I landed on my butt with a resounding thud. Upon my graceful landing, her stove bottom sliced my big toe. It wasn’t a bad slice. Just enough for me to have a scar. Not a ton of blood. Like a paper cut. What hurt the most was making it to her bathroom and trying not to leave a trail of pee there. Megan on the other hand, couldn’t make it that far. Plus, what I saw in my head, she saw in real life. Megan peed. I had made Megan pee in her pants. She walked to the bathroom defeated. After many many minutes in the bathroom, she finally came out, and couldn’t look me in the eye. Clean up might have been the worst thing I could ever imagine. We mixed lemon scented dishwashing soap with this raw egg yuck and now Megan’s pee. I think we told her parents we were trying to make a soufflé we learned about in cooking class. And even if they didn’t buy it, there is no way that they would have ever figured out the truth. I sometimes wonder if she ever told them. But more than that, I sometimes want to go egg skating again.